


rearview mirror

by bawling



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Dreamsharing, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 13:20:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18053270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bawling/pseuds/bawling
Summary: When Adam's clairvoyant dreams leave his fellow psychics at 300 Fox Way stumped, he forms an unlikely alliance with Blue, his ex-girlfriend, and Gansey, his high-profile college roommate, to discover their origin. There's just one problem: Gansey's shitheaded best friend, Ronan, who seems hell-bent on interfering with their extracurricular investigation. So why does Ronan keep showing up in Adam's dreams?





	rearview mirror

There were few ways Adam Parrish liked waking up less than drenched in his own sweat.

He’d been born into the sticky Virginia summer, and so he knew as well as the next that it was impossible to avoid. From an early age, he’d learned not to fight it. It was one of those things that wasn’t worth fighting. No matter how many fans you turned on or windows you cracked, the heat was always going to win, and Adam didn’t like to lose.

Thick August air pressed in on him as he was hurled into waking. His breath came in shallow heaves, his fists balled in the scratchy bedsheets. Adrenaline was swimming around in his pulse points.

It felt like coming out of scrying, which it definitely shouldn’t have.

He sat up, sheets pooling around his thighs, and rubbed his hands over the damp skin of his face. He could feel the anxiety of the dream more than he could actually remember it. He blinked, eyes filtering the morning light, trying to conjure it.

 _Trees_. That was what he’d been dreaming about. Trees, trees, and more trees, and then nothing at all. He caught the sudden scent of something foreign and comforting, like earth after rain.

_Must be the sage from last night._

His eyes slid to the half-burned bundle of sage on his nightstand, lying on a plastic lid that had once belonged to a Greek yogurt container.

He wondered if Blue was awake. He thought about the last load of laundry he needed to wash and pack. He was itching to get on the road. He wanted to lie in bed all day.

Nerves hit him like a blow to the gut. Today was the day he went to college. No, not just college. _Harvard University_. He felt the thrill of it trail up the back of his neck. It was possible, then, that he was just nervous about school.

He didn’t think so.

Adam pushed himself to his feet and stretched his tired arms above his head. His fingertips brushed against the low beams that crisscrossed along the inside of the turret, holding up the conical roof just on the other side of these walls.

He shuffled around the foot of his twin bed and around the packed duffle bag and single cardboard box of belongings that were waiting dutifully by the hatch in the attic floor.

The wall opposite his bed had a single-pane window, under which he kept his altar. It was a refined word for what it really was—a thrift store, three-legged table that held his favorite scrying bowl, a small pile of herbs Jimi had given him for grounding, and a tarot deck gifted to him by Persephone.

On either side of the window stood a full-length mirror, and below them, out-of-use scrying bowls sat empty, continuously inviting energy. It occurred to Adam that they had lived in this room longer than he had.

They’d been here when he moved in over a year ago, left behind by Blue’s aunt, Neeve, who had disappeared under mysterious and, according to Blue, possibly unsavory circumstances. He remembered the dubious nature with which the women of 300 Fox Way had eyed her undisturbed ritual pentagram on the night he’d moved in.

He didn't mind. A witch for a witch. It seemed simple enough.

Adam stepped into the space between the mirrors. He hummed with alignment, it traveled up from the pit of his stomach and out to the tips of his fingers. This feeling—he  _never_ doubted this.

He kneeled in front of the bowl and focused his gaze on the depthless black of the water, the rest of the room fading away slowly as he left his body behind.

He wondered aimlessly for a while, skating along the edges of memories that he normally kept locked away—the night he’d moved in, standing on the porch with a duffle bag of secondhand clothes and one working ear. He didn’t like to think about how he might’ve had two working ears if only he’d accepted Blue’s offer the first time. Or second. Or tenth.

He pulled away, trying to center on what he’d seen while he was asleep. He heard his own voice at a distance, flat in the closeness of the small room.

_Show me my dream. Show me the trees._

Then he was in a clearing. Trees surrounded him, old and unfamiliar and unimaginable. They craned their branches down towards him, sighing quietly, then louder. He could hear their one-sided conversation in his deaf ear. He was eavesdropping—tuned into a psychic frequency that wasn’t intended for him.

_Hello?_

Even as he moved his lips, he knew that he couldn’t speak—it was one of the rules. He lowered his eyes back to the clearing and saw that someone else was there. They had been, and they hadn’t been. In this place, they were the same thing.

It was a man. No, it was a boy. Adam couldn’t tell. His back was turned, hair buzzed close to scalp and clothed in a dark jacket and denim. Even without the logic of the dream crafting itself around him, it was plain to Adam that this person _knew_ these trees—he unequivocally _belonged_.

He was close enough that Adam could’ve reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder, but that wasn’t allowed. His head inclined just slightly, like he felt Adam’s still presence behind him. Adam needed to see his face.

_Who are you?_

A lot of things happened at once.

Adam came back to his body with a violent start. He lost his balance and fell back, his elbows hitting the hardwood floor with a thud, one leg tucked under him and the one bare foot dangling in the air.

Maura Sargent was peering at him with spry curiosity, her head looking disembodied where it emerged above the hatch in the floor.

“I knocked.”

She clearly hadn’t expected to find Adam, well, however he was. He didn’t blame her.

“Oh.” Adam briefly wondered if she’d heard him say something, because he wasn’t altogether sure if he had said something or not. “Sorry for the—sorry.”

“Not nearly the weirdest thing I’ve walked in on in this room.” This was not as comforting as Maura seemed to think it was. “I just wanted to let you know that there’s breakfast ready, you two should eat something before you hit the road.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll be right down.”

She gave him a longsuffering, motherly sort of look before her eyes shifted to his rumpled coveralls. They were lying on the floor where he’d kicked them off after his last ever shift at Boyd’s Garage the night before.

“Do you think you can change the oil in the van before you leave? We’ll have to go next Wednesday if you don’t.”

It was hard to say whether this meant that she was available to get the oil changed next Wednesday, or if she knew the car would stop working next Wednesday by psychic means.

“Sure.”

“Great.” Maura knocked again, like one of those cops on TV patting the top of a loaded squad car. She lowered herself out of sight and called back in a cheerful voice. “There’s bacon!”

Adam looked resignedly up at his altar.

So much for morning witchcraft.

*

It may have come as a shock to most, considering he’d been living in a house full of psychics for the past fifteen months, but Adam was still adjusting to the fact that magic was real.

And not in a remote, intangible way. It was his. After so many years of trying to make things work for him, there was still a moment of disbelief whenever he realized he didn’t have to try—it just _was_.

He sat at the scuffed kitchen table shuffling his tarot cards, a plate of eggs pushed to the side in favor of the Celtic cross he was about to read.

Blue Sargent sat across from him, spooning down a cup of yogurt in her pajamas and looking distinctly less Blue than the rest of the world was used to seeing her.

“Did you take down the trees in your room?”

This was Maura, who stood at the stove in a pair of yoga pants with Mr. Gray, looking over his shoulder as he filled a plate with breakfast food. He went to grab a piece of bacon but Maura intercepted it.

Blue frowned up at her mother.

“Why would I take them down?”

“I thought you might want to take them with you.”

Blue pursed her lips. The walls of her bedroom were decorated with cardboard trees that she’d traced, cut and painted. She clearly _had_ thought about taking them with her, but had come to the apparent conclusion that it was on par with bringing one’s teddy bear to college.

“I’m not. It’s not like they’re bothering anyone by being here.” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why?”

Maura said _no reason_ at the same time that Mr. Gray said _home gym_.

Blue huffed and leaned back in her chair, polka-dotted shorts bunching awkwardly around her thighs. Adam figured they were meant to be scandalously short on any average-sized girl, but as Blue was not, they hung nearly to her knees.

He realized that Blue was watching him watching her. Adam cleared his throat and resumed shuffling his deck. Blue tried to hide a little satisfied smirk and failed.

With careful precision, Adam set the deck on the table and cut it with his left hand. Then, he began to draw.

_Ace of Wands. The Moon. Three of Swords._

Blue tilted her head to get a better look at his cards.

“Is it just me or is that first one overwhelmingly phallic?”

“Shut up.”

She clucked her tongue and went back to her yogurt.

They’d met just after the start of their Junior year, even though they’d attended the same high school all four years. They chalked it up to the fact that they were loners, even though Blue hadn’t gone entirely unknown for her snark and homespun ensembles, and Adam had been top of their class in every subject.

They’d only been together a few months when Adam moved in, and broken up a month later.

He still thought about Blue sometimes. He thought about the soft skin at the back of her neck, the scent of her hair that pooled there. The electricity that threaded through him the first time they kissed, fucked, unaware of the amplifying effect she had on psychics which, as it turned out, worked on him in more ways than one.

Then he’d think about the constant fighting and it was easier to accept they were better off as whatever they were now.

They’d only been together two weeks when Maura had given Adam his first reading.

_Three of Cups. Five of Wands. The Devil._

Maura sat to Adam’s left, a piece of buttered toast in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Her gaze traveled from Adam’s abandoned plate of eggs to the cards spread out before him.

She sipped her coffee with forced casualty.

“What’s all this?”

There was a long second before Adam realized she was talking to him. 

“Nothing specific.”

“Is that so?" 

Maura didn’t sound convinced. Adam took another look at the cards.

_Knight of Pentacles. Seven of Swords. Ten of Pentacles._

He wasn’t sure he was, either.

“I don’t know.”

“Maura? Are you—oh.”

The four of them looked up to see Persephone and Calla standing in the kitchen doorway. They each matched Maura in a pair of yoga pants. 

Blue rose from her place at the table and muttered as she brushed past them on her way towards the stairs.

“This better not have anything to do with the _home gym_.” 

Persephone and Calla sat.

Maura set her coffee cup down and tapped her long fingers lightly over the first row of cards. Adam trailed his eyes over them again, catching on the image of five men holding budding sticks that made a strange shape, like a broken pentagram, obstructing their faces from view.

No, not a pentagram. Branches.

“Is it possible to accidentally scry while you’re sleeping?”

All three women stopped mid bite or mid sip and stared at him. 

“I had a dream last night, but I could feel myself come back to my body when I woke up.” Adam elaborated. “I couldn’t remember it so I scryed back there after I woke up.”

“Where did you go?” 

Maura’s voice was laced with healthy skepticism.

“I don’t know, some forest I’ve never been to? I could hear the trees in my deaf ear. Someone else was there, someone I’ve never met.”

“Normally the people you see in dreams are just faces you’ve stored in your subconscious.”

Persephone supplied. Adam lacked the vernacular to make his point so his voice took on an unfamiliar edge of certainty.

“I’m sure. He was—” Adam considered for a moment. It was true he hadn’t seen their face, whatever feeling that place had given him was a part of it. Their presence was a fragile specificity that fell apart when he tried to describe it. “I would’ve remembered seeing someone like that.” 

_Two of Cups._

“What did he do?” Maura questioned. “Did he say anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing.” Maura parroted flatly. Adam shrugged. She sighed and reached for her coffee. “It’s possible this is a new manifestation. When I was your age I—”

“What’s it called?” 

Adam cut her off, anxious to put a name to the unfamiliar feeling that was still rolling around in his gut.

“Oneiromancy.  _Possibly_.”

“Why possibly?”

Maura exchanged a look with Calla and Persephone.

“Traditionally, oneiromancy is the ability to interpret future events from one’s dreams.” Persephone delicately stabbed Adam’s eggs with her fork. “For example, last night I had a dream that I was stranded on the highway—”

Maura shooed Persephone away from the eggs.

“No, that’s about the oil change.”

“Oh.” She blinked slowly. “You’re right.”

Adam pressed again.

“Could it be something else? Some other form of divination?”

“I’m not sure.”

Maura wrinkled her forehead, like she was thinking about something that may or may not be relevant to the conversation. Calla voiced her indelicate opinion. 

“Are we sure this isn’t a side effect of his using _prurient artifacts_?”

Calla was not a fan of scrying, and had made this fact known loudly and often since Persephone’s willingness to teach Adam everything he wanted to know about the divinatory arts, and especiallysince Adam’s economical reuse of Neeve’s materials.

“ _Calla_.”

Persephone sounded like she was admonishing a cat for clawing the furniture. Calla rolled her eyes and retracted her claws. Maura shook her head with finality and stood from her chair. Persephone and Calla echoed her movements. 

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves. I think you’d be better off getting out of your own head. You have school to focus on.” This wasn’t the answer Adam had been hoping for. “ _If_ it happens again before we see you, call.”

The three women and their matching quizzical frowns filed out of the kitchen. Maura hung back in the kitchen doorway and pointed a weighty finger at Adam.

“Take supplies with you for a protection spell. Cast one every night, at least for the time being.”

“I thought you said I should focus on school?”

“You won’t be able to do much of anything if your soul wanders off while you’re sleeping.” She turned to follow Calla and Persephone. “And don’t forget to change the oil in the van. I don’t want to have to rescue Persephone.”

Adam and Mr. Gray exchanged a look.

Psychic or no, the Sargent women had a remarkable talent for never letting you forget: Life first, then everything else.

* 

The late afternoon sun beat down on the windshield of his used two-door, sending sparks of light into Adam’s eyes from where he sat behind the steering wheel.

His hands smelled like the oil change he'd done on the communal van a few hours earlier. He thought about how he was probably going to smell like an oil change when he met his roommate for the first time.

He was watching the cacophony of bodies shuffling on the steps outside of 300 Fox Way. Blue lifted herself onto her tiptoes to hug Maura, Calla, Persephone, Mr. Gray, and then Maura again.

Adam could still feel the damp spot on his cheek where Maura had kissed him goodbye. He thought about all of them, the women of 300 Fox Way—how they’d made room for him. Theirs was not the kind of generosity that came with an expiration date.

Adam’s foot twitched subconsciously towards the gas pedal.

Blue rapped on the passenger’s seat window. Adam unlocked the door. With a last wave towards the porch, she deposited herself into the seat beside him, then turned to squeezed her backpack between two boxes labeled _BLUE CLOTHES_.

She sank back, the short tufts of her pigtails catching on the polyester.

“Well,” She let out a long breath. “That’s over.”

Adam glanced sideways at her. She was looking back at the now empty front porch, like she was already thinking about all the things she missed she’d never noticed until they were out of reach.

“Was it worse than you thought?”

She turned to him, her dark eyebrows complicated.

“What do you mean?” 

“Leaving,” Adam replied evenly. “Saying goodbye.” 

Blue shrugged and reached for her seatbelt.

“They’ve always known I wanted to go. It’s just that—” Her voice sounded small and not at all like Blue. “—the leaving has gotten smaller, I guess. Why does Boston feel farther away than Venezuela?” 

“So why aren’t you going?”

“I _am_ going.”

“To South America.”

Blue gave him a look. 

“My stepdad wrote the dean of the College of Liberal Arts— _without_ telling me—so I’d get in.”

“It’s the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.”

“Whatever.”

“So, you’re going for Mr. Gray?”

“ _No_.” She prickled. “If I want to work in South America, I need a job that pays me to travel. If I want to get a job that pays me to travel, I need Harvard.” 

“There’s tons of good schools closer to Henrietta.” Adam heard himself drawl the name, like his tongue knew where it came from. “You don’t _need_ Harvard.”

“What, and you do?”

“It’s different for me.” 

“Why? Because this isn’t good enough for you?” 

She ferociously waved her small hand in a gesture that implied both the house and herself. 

“Can you not start?” 

“Can you not be so easy to start with?” 

Adam jerked his head away, body itching to put physical space between him and her disappointment. He curled his fingers into fists and fixed his eyes on the words etched into the driver's side mirror.

 _Objects in mirror are closer than they appear._  

There was nearly a minute of silence between them. Adam felt the familiar wavering flame of anger burning out to nothingness, replaced instead by that little nagging fear that always seemed to accompany thoughts of Blue.

He sighed and started to turn the key in the ignition, when Blue reached out and caught his hand in hers. He looked up, and Blue was looking back at him.

“You know you’re my family, right?”

It was the subtle press of her fingertips into his palm that spoke for her.

_I love you._

“I know.”

_You, too._

Blue fiddled with the radio as Adam backed out of the dirt driveway. He’d barely hit the turn signal at the end of Fox Way when Blue gasped so loud that Adam thought his heart was going to burst out of his own rib cage.

“ _Wait_.” 

“What?”

Blue turned to him, a very serious expression blanketed across her pretty features.

“We need gelato for the road.”

“Jesus, Blue.”

“Is that a yes?”

It was a yes.

**Author's Note:**

> witch adam has rights! harvard shenanigans and romantic tensions are imminent!
> 
> find me on tumblr [@bawling](http://bawling.tumblr.com)


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